


My Thoughts Echo Your Name

by itsamagicalplace



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: AU, Amnesia, F/M, Recovery, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-02
Updated: 2015-07-29
Packaged: 2018-04-07 08:37:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4256709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsamagicalplace/pseuds/itsamagicalplace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Melinda May awakens one morning, alone in a hospital bed, she can see only the terrifying memories burning behind her eyes. But after a man she’s never met shows up in her room, insisting that he knows her better than she knows herself, things get even worse than she could have ever imagined.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to put a warning here for potentially distressing scenes.

_Fire.  
_

_That was the first thing May registered as she gradually felt herself returning to consciousness._

_Through blurred vision, she could just make out the silhouette of flames flickering, a deep orange glow that licked around the darkness, creeping gradually closer. She could feel the heat penetrating the bare skin of her face already, an uncomfortable warmth that left her cringing away in her state of half-consciousness._

_Debris floated across the scene of destruction in front of her, like blackened feathers, drifting in the wind of horror. A few ashes came to rest in her eyelashes, and she swiped them away, the throbbing ache from her ribs becoming ever more apparent with each movement._

_Iron lingered on her tongue, and she recognised the taste of blood immediately._

_The smell, an acrid scent of petrol and metal, both overpowering and nauseating, consumed her nostrils, leaving nothing but the truth filling every sense she possessed._

_The fire burned on._

_May glanced to the side, twisting her neck in a way she knew full well any doctor would shout at her for doing in that moment. She could almost hear Phil’s voice, telling her to keep still until help arrived, to not risk damaging her spine any more than it already could potentially be._

_But Phil wasn’t there right now, and she shifted her body upwards a little, moving closer to a sitting position than the one she had been in._

_Her eyes fell upon a little girl, resting almost peacefully upon the ground approximately three metres to the left of her, one shoe missing and a tiny foot resting in the smouldering grass. The other was bent at an angle that spoke only of snapped limbs. Crimson scattered the front of her once-cream dress, blooming slowly as she stared glassy-eyed up into the forever of night._

_As she took in the scene around her, and realised the truth of what she had done, for the first and only time in her life, Melinda May screamed._

* * *

May opened her eyes.

For a while now, she had become slowly aware of a rhythmic beeping, originating somewhere to her right. It was soothing, almost, and she’d found herself timing her breaths to each individual sound.

Inhale. Beep. Exhale. Beep.

She could do that.

Learning tai-chi had taught her to relax both the mind and body, and with the thoughts running through her head right now, the former was exactly what she needed.

Through the slightly irritating glare of the sunlight, drifting through a crack in the blinds covering the window opposite her, she closed her eyes once more, letting the sounds attempt to lull her back into the world before conscious awareness.

She was uncomfortable, that much she knew, but the physical pain she could feel emanating from her head was nothing compared to that within her chest, the grief and sorrow pressing against her ribcage, fighting to be released and terrorise her once more.

Breathe.

The machine upped the speed of the beeping, the rhythm becoming more erratic, and it took her longer than it potentially should have done to realise it was tracking her heartbeat.

She was unsure how long she’d been asleep, but from the brief glance she had taken when she’d dared to lift her eyelids, May knew she was in a hospital bed, in a single room.

Alone.

That’s exactly what she needed to be right now too.

No noise. No questions.

Just the blood pounding in her head, and the fear running in her veins.

She knew they were coming though, knew one-hundred percent she was going to have officers at the door to her ward as soon as a doctor informed them she was conscious again. They would have no choice. Not now. Not after what had happened.

How long had it been? A day? A week? Not knowing how long she’d been unconscious meant she had no idea how much time had passed. No idea if anybody else had been hurt. No idea if the little girl had survived.

Even as soon as the thought entered her mind, May knew that she hadn’t.

She’d known as soon as she had seen her, lying in the singed grass around them.

It was the eyes. You could always tell by the eyes.

Her mother once told her, that eyes were the windows into the soul, that one look within them could reveal everything a person had ever felt or desired.

Katya’s eyes had been empty.

May blinked. She needed to get that image out of her mind, straight away. She knew it was going to haunt her dreams, fill her nightmares each time she even dared to try and sleep, but there was no other way around it..

To distract herself, she focused instead on other eyes she could remember. On her own, that she saw in the bathroom mirror most days when she brushed her teeth. On her mother’s, that held so much wisdom within them. On Phil’s, that filled with warmth every time she met his gaze.

Phil.

May swallowed hard, and glanced around the room for any sign he had been there with her - a jacket over a chair maybe, or an empty polystyrene cup that would have once held a hospital’s poor excuse for coffee.

There was nothing.

He would have come, if he had known, surely. And he would know, because clearly she hadn’t been back to their apartment since.

It was probably all over the news anyway.

May knew things had been difficult between the two of them recently, what with his mother’s death, and her working extra hours to pull in more money for them whilst he was off work, but after what had happened, she was sure he would still come rushing to her bed the moment he found out. That was the kind of guy Phil Coulson was. He loved and cared so wholly and entirely that sometimes it overwhelmed her, but May knew she never wanted him to stop.

Maybe he had been and left already, after all, she wasn’t sure how long she had been lying there.

She glanced around once more.

The room she was in was mostly bare. There was a wooden chair in the far corner, complete with worn and faded blue fabric cushion, that had clearly been sat on hundreds if not thousands of times over the previous years.

The window was covered by white blinds, closed about eighty-percent of the way, and so still letting in streams of light that zig-zagged across her bed.

She looked at her hands, resting upon the crisp, sterile sheets. They were remarkably unmarred, considering, with an IV taped to one, and the other sporting only a small white bandage. Any signs of blood or ash were gone, and her fingernails were perfectly clean, almost looking better than they ever had.

Weird.

She lifted the bandaged hand, expecting to be filled with aching bones and shooting pains, but her arm moved freely, and she tentatively reached up to feel her head.

Her hand came back clean, the stickiness of blood no longer matting in her hair, and she felt only a lump on the side of her skull, where she’d obviously hit it the hardest before losing consciousness.

How she was so unharmed, she did not understand. It wasn’t possible. She’d been sat next to Katya, and Katya was…

She didn’t need that image in her mind again, torturing herself internally, so she swallowed hard, her throat feeling like sandpaper, before exploring the rest of the room with her eyes.

There was a small bedside table to her left, and an old cracked vase stood upon it, a bunch of red roses greedily drinking up what was left of the water from within.

Flowers.

So somebody had been here.

But Phil? He knew she didn’t like roses.

That meant they were probably from her mother, plucked from the garden she so meticulously kept maintained throughout the seasons, back at the house May had grown up in. She was the only other person who would bring her flowers. Natasha would have brought vodka or something.

May smiled slightly at the thought, but the darkness returned instantaneously.

She continued her visual sweep to her left. Next to the vase, May noticed something she’d missed on her first go-around of the room.

It was a cell phone, a smart one too, that she was pretty sure she’d never seen before. As she reached over to pick it up, wincing slightly as blood pounded harder in her head, she couldn’t help but think it was unlike one that her mother would own, and it definitely wasn’t Phil’s - no Captain America comic-book casing - unless he’d just been out to get a new one.

It was unlocked, with no passcode, and as it opened up the background of a beach at sunset filled the screen. Nope, definitely not Phil’s.

Paying little more attention to the phone, other than reading the time as 10:44am, she dialled his number anyway, hoping whoever owned it wouldn’t mind her using it, and waited impatiently as the line rang out.

He always answered to her, no matter what had happened.

If he was in the hospital at the current time, he would have his phone on him, so May could only assume he was elsewhere, possibly teaching a lecture, or at an early cooking class.

That hurt a little, but maybe she hadn’t been expected to wake up at this time? Perhaps he’d been told to return another day?

She waited for the beep, before leaving a message, her voice shaking a little as she spoke, the raspiness that came from a dry throat scratching at each word.

“Phil, it’s me, I’m awake… I’m so sorry. What happened Phil, you know, right? It… it was my fault, I think it was my fault. Where are you?”

May paused as she heard voices outside her room, before wrapping up her message.

“I think the doctor is outside now, the police will probably come later… I’ll speak to you soon, or see you, or… I’m sorry.”

She hung up the phone as the door opened, replacing it onto the nightstand and watching warily as a man entered her room.

Looking him up and down, she took in his appearance, right from his dark hair, cropped down to his skull, to his black shiny shoes, that spoke of business and work rather than of leisure.  

He wasn’t dressed in scrubs or any kind of distinguishing uniform, but she realised pretty quickly he must have been her doctor. He seemed surprised to find her awake, however delight soon replaced his initial expression of confusion.

“Melinda!”

She nodded, sitting herself up a little more in preparation for the questions she knew were coming to her. The fact he called her Melinda instantly unnerved her - nobody did that. She was known as May, to pretty much everybody except her mother. And occasionally Phil, when it was just the two of them together…

“You’re awake. How do you feel?”

He hesitated by the door for a second, before closing it behind him, and pulling the wooden chair over the sit next to her.

She looked at him, properly, as he moved around the room. He seemed familiar in some way, but she wasn’t sure why; possibly he’d been on call when she was first brought in, or maybe he had visited her room previously, and she’d been drifting in and out of consciousness for some time.

“Physically, I feel okay” she replied honestly, glancing away again as he seemed to stare into her soul. He looked worried, and she was pretty sure he knew exactly how she’d ended up in that bed, and potentially how bad things were going to get for her as soon as she left.

The man nodded, before continuing.

“And mentally? Emotionally? Experiencing something like you have can be traumatic to the mind.”

She closed her eyes, a sickening feeling creeping up her spine.

How did she feel mentally?

She could see the body of a child every time she closed her eyes. She could almost feel the heat from the flames trying to consume them both. The smell of aviation fuel still lingered in her nose…

Traumatic was a slight understatement.

“Why am I here?” she asked instead, changing the subject away from any of that psychology crap. It was the sort of thing she’d find in one of those books she occasionally caught Phil reading before bed, such as “How to be the Best Boss” and “How to Improve the Mental State of your Team”.

Not her kind of thing.

“Well,” the man replied, watching her carefully, seeming to sense her reluctance to talk about herself. “For now it’s a precaution. You took a pretty strong knock to the head, so you’ve been kept in overnight for observation.”

“No,” she shook her head, getting tired of him seemingly skirting around the truth. “If it’s just a concussion, why am I here? Why aren’t the police interviewing me?”

“They interviewed the other guy” he replied, reaching over and picking up the phone from the table next to her - it was obviously his, although May wasn’t sure why a doctor would leave his phone in a patient’s room. “But it was clear he was out of it at the time on a concoction of drugs and alcohol, and he’s already been charged. You’ll probably have to give a victim impact statement later though.”

Drink. Drugs. Other guy. Victim.

Nothing made sense to her, and May had a sudden realisation that the doctor must have accidentally switched up her notes with another patient’s.

“I wasn’t a victim of anything” she replied quietly, wishing there was a glass of water she could drink to try and steady her voice. “It was my fault.”

He looked up from his phone, and frowned. “No, it wasn’t Melinda. You were tested last night when you came in - your blood alcohol was 0.0, and,” he smiled at her a little. “I know you’re an excellent driver.”

She stared at him - he really had got her mixed up with another patient, hadn’t he?

“What do you mean?” she asked slowly, registering the last half of his sentence along with everything else. “I wasn’t driving last night -”

“I watched you pull out of the driveway.”

“You -” she blinked, before taking a deep breath. Something felt wrong, very wrong, and she wasn’t sure what it was. Was this guy even a doctor? Or a random man that had broken into the ward.

“You watched me” she repeated slowly, letting the words sink in.

He frowned, before nodding again. “Yes, from the front room. You said you needed some time to think and clear your head after…” he looked a little uncomfortable, before continuing. “Well, after everything that was said.”

She unconsciously withdrew from him, looking around the room again, panic building in her chest.

“Melinda,” he asked, watching her strangely, a slight dawning realisation creeping into his eyes - her mother was right, they showed everything. “What do you think happened last night?”

“I -” May started, before closing her eyes. She knew what had happened, could still feel the heat lapping at her skin.

Which reminded her.

“Why aren’t I burnt?”

“Burnt? There was no fire” he replied slowly, watching her in a way that made her feel under the spotlight.

“Yes there was.”

She knew there was, knew with certainty. She would never forget what it felt like to have her skin almost bubbling as it threatened to melt from her body.

“Melinda,” he said slowly, bringing her back to the present in a tone that suggested something was beginning to dawn on him. “Do you know what day it is?”

“I don’t know how long I’ve been in here” she replied honestly, realising she should have just looked at the date on the phone when she used it.

He paused, before asking her one more question, in a quieter voice she was pretty sure was laced with hidden pain.

“Do you know who I am?”

That stopped her, and she stared at him for a few moments, before slowly shaking her head.

“I recognise you,” she admitted, watching as his expression changed. “My doctor?” she asked quietly, knowing instantly she was wrong. Somehow, she just knew, and the look on his face only confirmed her thoughts.

“Your doctor” he repeated, as though in a far off place. “You think…” He stood then, pushing back the chair and reaching up to scratch his head. “We need to get somebody”

He headed towards the door, but May called out to him, needing to know the truth.

“Wait.”

He paused, turning to face her with a look of sorrow on his face.

“Who are you?” she asked quietly, knowing his answer was going to change everything. She could feel it in her gut, a sense of pre-emption that whatever words followed, would alter what she thought she knew about everything that had happened.

“Melinda,” he replied, shaking his head with a sad smile, the door half open. “I’m your husband.”


	2. Chapter 2

 

Her husband.

Her _husband._

The word swam around her head as the blood seemed to descend into her lower limbs, leaving her faint, the room beginning to fade from her vision as she became locked in her subconscious mind.

She was married.

It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be.

May wasn’t an openly romantic person; she never had been. But she was happy with Phil. They’d known each other since school, had been together since college, were living together in an upmarket apartment right in the middle of the city.

They had plans, and dreams, and a future together.

Only a few weeks earlier - or what felt like a few weeks to her anyway - he had been joking around about what their kids would look and act like, and she had banned any form of Captain America labelled merchandise being bought for them.

Even the memory brought a small smile to her face, but it dropped almost instantly.

She couldn’t now be married to somebody else.

What had happened for them to leave each other?

A terrifying thought hit her, that during the blank space in her memory, something terrible could have happened to Phil, but she knew deep in her heart that she would remember that, knew she would never be able to forget an event that would cause her so much pain.

May vaguely registered as the man - her now husband - left the room in silence, and she assumed he had gone to get an actual doctor.

If he was telling the truth, if every word he had spoken was accurate and real, what had she forgotten? What had happened prior to this that had not only changed everything she knew about her life, but had also seemingly wiped her memory of all that she was aware, taking her back to that one night of horror that was still swimming in her mind.

It didn’t take a genius to work out, that if he was being honest with her, and she’d been involved in some kind of car accident, that she was potentially suffering from amnesia. They had studied it back in school, when she’d been placed next to one Phil Coulson in their first term of Psychology of the Conscious Mind, and they had learned the intricate methods of memory formation that could so easily be wiped from one’s brain through a simple accident.

The return of her husband, along with a female doctor who May could instantly tell was probably one of the youngest at the hospital, a nurse who carried a clipboard, and a boy of no more than twenty wearing the nametag “student nurse”, brought May out of her thoughts for a moment, and she rearranged herself on the bed a little, so she was sitting and facing them for the upcoming questions she knew were on the way.

They asked her dates - what day she thought it was? What month? What year? They asked her places - which hospital was she in? In which country? In which state?

“Melinda Qiaolian May,” she replied quietly, staring ahead so as not to have to look into the eyes of disappointment and sorrow that radiated from the man beside her. “Address: Apartment 616, Stark Tower, New York.”

She watched from the corner of her eye as he shook his head, turning slightly towards the window. The nurse opposite of her noted something on her clipboard, before the doctor cleared her throat. May shifted her gaze cautiously towards her.

“What is the last thing you remember Melinda?”

She closed her eyes. Not that she needed to, the images were still burning her eyelids, from inside out.

“The… the plane crash.”

Her husband widened his eyes, before clearing his throat, and turned to the doctor. “It was in 2007, Bahrain. She was piloting a private aircraft carrying a mother and daughter away from the area, when rebels shot the plane down. They crashed near to an abandoned warehouse. Melinda was the only survivor.”

The doctor nodded, and indicated to the nurse to note something down in front of her.

Melinda took a steadying breath. She had been the only survivor. Eva and Katya, they had both perished. But rebels? She hadn’t known that. She’d honestly thought it had been her own fault, something she had done wrong.

It was still little comfort to her to know she couldn’t have prevented it.

“Ms May,” she began, smiling at her in a sympathetic way she knew she had probably done a hundred times that year already. “After reviewing your answers, I believe I can safely come to the conclusion that you are suffering from a semi-severe case of Retrograde Amnesia. This is where your brain is currently unable to retrieve memories that were stored within in your subconscious mind prior to a certain date. We believe that the trauma you received to your head in the collision last night is the reasoning behind it, and hence many memories you made before then are currently inaccessible to you. You remember the night of the first accident because that is most likely the largest and most significant memory you possessed prior.”

“Will I get them back?” May asked, swallowing hard at the realisation she really had potentially forgotten half of her life.

“It is hard to say,” the doctor continued, flipping through the clipboard of notes the nurse had handed to her. “Some patients can retrieve them pretty quickly after the initial event, and make a complete recovery. Some can recall only a select number of events after various time periods, and others, they never manage to remember anything from the time period again.”

May nodded numbly. There was a chance she would never remember what had happened to her over the last… however many years.

“What year is it?” she asked quietly, needing to know just how much she was missing.

“It is two-thousand-and-fifteen.”

Eight years.

She had forgotten eight whole years of her life.

What the hell had happened in the last eight years?

What had made her life take the path it clearly had done? What had happened to Phil and her, why were they not only no longer together, but why was she married to somebody else? She took another look at the man who was apparently her husband, and found him watching her sorrowfully.

“Thank you Doctor Simmons,” he murmured quietly, sitting down next to May once more. “I’d like to talk to my wife now.”

The medical team nodded, offered their assistance if they had any more questions, before exiting the room, closing the door behind them, and leaving the two of them alone together in the silence.

May focused on the rhythmic beeping that was still coming from the machine beside her; she was a little surprised she’d managed to keep her heart rate so steady whilst her world was turned upside down. Years of practise in tai-chi, and holding her breaths to a set pace, had definitely come in handy to her.

She wondered if she still practised, or if was another thing that no longer had any kind of place within her life.

“I don’t want to overwhelm you,” her husband told her softly, watching her with deep brown eyes. “So I think for now it is probably best if I only give you the basic details.”

May nodded in silence, not bothering to tell him she was already completely out of her depth with everything that had happened.

“My name is Andrew Garner; you sometimes call me Drew. We are married, Melinda, we have been for almost four years now. You took my surname afterwards, so you’re technically Melinda Garner. The ceremony photographs are on a table in our hallway at home, I can bring one in to show you if you would like, see if it helps?”

May shook her head. She believed him, knew somehow that he was telling the truth, and that she could trust what he was saying to her. When he had first walked into her hospital room she had recognised him, knew that she had met him before deep down, but this had been the very last thing on her mind.

“Okay. Well, we live in a house together just out of town. I mainly work as a Clinical Psychologist -”

She remembered her thought when he’d first spoken to her that morning, that he was using psycho-babble on her. A small smile crept to her face a she realised she’d been right.

“And since the accident, you have worked in the administrative department of an airline. You specialise in the safety and pre-flight-check documentation.”

She nodded, realising she must have been banned from flying, and had her license revoked.

Nothing he said to her triggered any kind of recognition, any memory flashing into her conscious mind, like they so often did on television shows and movies.

The words he spoke only partially filled the gaps she had, like they were translucent, and she could still see there was more to be found through the cloaked haze.

“Where did we meet?” she asked instead, still trying to grasp onto something she could see in her mind.

“You attended a session at my practice following the accident. If I’m honest, I think your mother made you come; she suggested that you weren’t coping well with the emotional trauma, but even with me you never truly opened up about it.”

The door cracked open at his words, and a nurse poked her head around the edge.

“Visiting time ends in five minutes” she announced briskly, nodding at them both before leaving once more.

Andrew stretched his legs out from the chair, before raising himself up to standing. He picked up his jacket from the back of it, smoothing out the creases before sliding each arm into its respective sleeve.

“I have a session this afternoon, but I’ll call your mother and tell her you are awake. She’ll probably come in to see you later.”

May nodded again. Her mother. She wondered how much Lian had changed in the past eight years, how much she would know about her daughter’s life, and which gaps she could fill in that Andrew did not know.

Like, why had she been apparently forced to attend therapy.

And what had happened with Phil.

Andrew half-leaned over her, as though he was going to kiss her on the forehead, but before he reached her he paused, frowning slightly, and straightened back up.

“I… if you don’t remember me, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable” he explained, shaking his head a little.

May smiled a little, and thanked him quietly.

He seemed like a good guy, and she could easily tell that he cared for her. It almost physically hurt to know she couldn’t remember feeling the same way.

May could only hope that something she heard or saw over the next few days would trigger a part of her brain, potentially returning her memories to her -  and soon.

 

 


End file.
